For nearly a decade, SAP’s annual maintenance fees held broadly stable. That changed in 2022, and the pattern established then has continued every year since, including into 2026. For any organisation still running SAP Standard Support or SAP Enterprise Support on an on-premise landscape, understanding exactly how this mechanism works, and what leverage still exists within it, matters more with each passing renewal cycle.
How the Adjustment Mechanism Actually Works
The current fee adjustment is not a one-time increase but a recurring annual mechanism tied to local inflation. SAP’s own confirmed statement for 2026 sets the terms plainly: effective January 1, 2026, SAP adjusts the annual fee for existing SAP Standard Support, SAP Enterprise Support, and SAP Product Support for Large Enterprises agreements based on the respective local Consumer Price Index rate, capped at a maximum increase of 5.0 percent regardless of how high local inflation runs. Coverage of the pattern’s origin explains that this mechanism was first invoked in 2022 after nearly a decade of stable support pricing, with SAP citing higher energy and labour costs alongside increasing expenses for third-party services as the justification for breaking from a decade of held pricing.
The critical detail often missed on first reading is that this adjustment applies only after a contract’s initial term and first renewal term have passed. SAP’s standard support agreement terms explicitly protect new purchases and early-term renewals from this adjustment, which means the fee increase lands differently depending on precisely where an individual organisation sits in its own contract lifecycle, not on a single fixed calendar date applying uniformly to every SAP customer.
Why This Particular Cost Line Is Easy to Overlook
Support fees rarely trigger the same scrutiny as a major software licence purchase or a cloud migration business case, precisely because they arrive as a routine annual renewal rather than a discrete new spending decision requiring fresh approval. That routine framing is exactly why a compounding, CPI-linked increase can run for several consecutive years before anyone on the finance or IT side stops to calculate its cumulative effect against the original support budget baseline set before 2022.
The organisations that catch this early are the ones that treat support fee renewals with the same budget scrutiny applied to any other material recurring cost, building year-over-year tracking that isolates the CPI adjustment from any changes in the underlying licensed base, so the two effects do not get blended into a single confusing total that obscures which portion of the increase is negotiable and which portion is simply the annual mechanism running as designed.
The Pattern Across Every Cycle So Far
The trajectory since 2022 has been consistent and worth tracking as a pattern rather than treating each year’s announcement as an isolated event. The initial 2023 increase was capped at 3.3 percent. The following cycle, effective January 2024, raised the cap to 5.0 percent, a pattern that has held constant for 2025 and again for 2026. Four consecutive years of CPI-linked increases at a meaningful cap is no longer an unusual adjustment. It is now the standing baseline any organisation running on-premise SAP support should build into multi-year budget planning by default.
This compounds in a way that is easy to underestimate looking at any single year in isolation. Support fees calculated as a percentage of licence value, typically around 22 percent annually for Enterprise Support, grow their base every time additional licences are purchased, and then compound further on top of that growing base through each year’s CPI adjustment. An organisation that has not actively reviewed its licensed footprint against actual deployment in several years is very likely paying full support on licences that deliver no active business value, with that support cost itself now rising annually on top of an already inflated base.
How the EU Antitrust Backdrop Changes the Conversation
The regulatory environment around SAP’s on-premise support and maintenance practices has also shifted meaningfully during this same period. The European Commission concluded an investigation into SAP’s on-premise maintenance and support policies in mid-2026, a process that ran alongside customer complaints about exactly the kind of fee escalation and product modularisation described here. That regulatory attention does not eliminate the CPI-linked adjustment mechanism, but it does mean SAP has faced genuine external pressure over how it structures on-premise support commercially, and organisations negotiating renewals now have a legitimate, well-documented regulatory backdrop to reference when pushing back on specific contract terms.
Raising this regulatory context directly during a renewal conversation, alongside the more familiar points about licence footprint and cloud migration alternatives, adds a dimension to the negotiation that was not available to customers pushing back on the original 2022 increase, and it is worth using deliberately rather than leaving unmentioned.
What Analysts Are Telling Customers to Do About It
Analyst reaction to the original 2022 announcement remains directly applicable to how organisations should think about every subsequent cycle. Forrester’s principal analyst covering the initial increase offered guidance that has aged well: the changes highlight the importance of sound contract negotiation when signing or renewing a deal, since maintenance fees had remained stagnant for a long time and this serves as a reminder to ensure contracts protect the organisation against future adjustments rather than allowing for unwelcome surprises.
The same analysis pointed to concrete options worth raising directly in any renewal conversation touched by this pattern: revisiting stalled conversations about migrating to cloud, either through SAP’s own RISE or GROW programmes or through a competing platform, since SAP has historically been notably more flexible in negotiations when a customer credibly considers leaving its on-premise footprint behind. Third-party maintenance providers were also flagged as a genuine alternative for organisations willing to give up access to future SAP enhancements in exchange for materially lower ongoing support costs on systems already considered stable.
The User Community’s Response Has Been Persistent
This is not a change SAP’s customer base has accepted quietly. Coverage of user group reaction to the original increase captured the core complaint directly from a German user group board member, who argued that the value received for maintenance had fallen over time, making the price rise difficult to justify, and pointed to increasing modularisation of the core ERP product as the underlying cause, since solutions that were previously bundled within the ERP are now increasingly marketed and priced as separate additions.
That specific criticism, that support fees keep rising while an expanding share of functionality gets unbundled and sold separately, remains just as relevant in 2026 as it was when first raised, and it is worth raising directly in any renewal negotiation as a legitimate point of leverage rather than treating the CPI-based increase as an isolated, unrelated cost.
Building CPI Adjustments Into Multi-Year Planning
Given four consecutive years of this pattern, any organisation still building annual IT budgets as though support fees are flat year over year is working from an outdated assumption. A more accurate multi-year model treats the CPI-linked adjustment, capped at five percent, as a standing assumption applied to the support line every single year until SAP signals otherwise, with any actual increase below that cap treated as a modest positive variance rather than the default expectation.
This shift in budgeting assumption matters beyond simple accuracy. Building the adjustment into multi-year forecasts from the outset makes the true multi-year cost of remaining on-premise versus migrating to a cloud subscription considerably easier to compare honestly, since the on-premise support trajectory is no longer being understated relative to the more clearly defined subscription cost of an alternative path.
Practical Steps Before the Next Adjustment Lands
The most immediate action available to any organisation affected by this pattern is confirming exactly where the current contract sits relative to its initial term and first renewal, since that determines whether the coming year’s adjustment applies at all. Beyond that timing check, a genuine licence footprint audit, comparing what is actively supported against what is actually deployed and used, tends to surface meaningful savings independent of whatever the CPI adjustment itself amounts to in a given year.
For organisations already on a cloud migration path through RISE or GROW, it is worth confirming explicitly how the transition affects support fee exposure, since cloud subscriptions fold support into the overall subscription price rather than billing it as a separate percentage-based fee, which removes this specific annual adjustment mechanism entirely once the migration completes. For organisations remaining on-premise for the foreseeable future, treating this CPI-linked increase as a predictable, recurring line item to negotiate around annually, rather than an unwelcome surprise to react to each January, is the only sustainable long-term posture.
What This Means for Multi-Vendor Benchmarking
Organisations running SAP alongside Oracle, Microsoft, or other major enterprise vendors should resist the temptation to treat this CPI-linked mechanism as unique to SAP. Similar inflation-linked and percentage-based maintenance adjustments have appeared across the industry over the same period, and benchmarking SAP’s specific pattern against comparable clauses in parallel vendor contracts often reveals useful negotiating precedent. An organisation that has successfully negotiated a support fee cap or a longer price-lock period with one major vendor has a legitimate, concrete precedent to raise directly with SAP, rather than treating each vendor relationship as though it operates in total isolation from the others.
A Final Word on Timing Renewals Around the Adjustment
Because the CPI-linked adjustment applies specifically after a contract’s initial term and first renewal, organisations approaching either of those milestones have a genuine, time-sensitive reason to review broader contract terms while the adjustment mechanism does not yet apply, rather than waiting until it activates by default. Renegotiating protective terms, such as a longer price lock or a lower cap than the standard five percent, is a meaningfully easier conversation before the mechanism first applies than after several years of it running as the unchallenged default.
Conclusion
SAP’s support fee adjustment mechanism is no longer a one-time event from 2022. It is now an established annual pattern, capped at 5.0 percent and tied to local inflation, that has held consistently for multiple consecutive cycles including 2026. Organisations still treating each year’s notice as a fresh surprise are missing the opportunity to plan around a pattern that has become entirely predictable.
The organisations managing this well are combining an active licence footprint review with a clear-eyed understanding of where their current contract sits in its term cycle, and using both a credible cloud migration conversation and third-party support alternatives as genuine leverage points in every renewal, rather than accepting each year’s CPI-capped increase as a fixed cost with no room for negotiation.
